12 Historical Christian Fiction Books that Feature Mental Health/Illness
Mental Health has become a common topic of conversation in society, while mental illness still lives in the shadows of the taboo. However, Christian Fiction has long been wrestling with how faith, mental health/illness, and the Christian community should interact. Sung in the Shadows is my wrestle with the topic, but it’s not the only book out there you can read. Below are twelve titles that I have personally read or plan to read with story threads that deal with mental illness and mental health in general. I can guarantee that these stories interweave faith and mental illness into their stories in such a way as to give readers hope and to God all glory.
There are SOOOO many more books out there you can choose. The Inspirational Historical Fiction Index will allow you to choose by topic. If you’re looking for more reader recommendations, including contemporary stories, check out this post I made in Avid Readers to help find titles.
My Top Personal Reads
(In No Particular Order)
Sung in the Shadows by Crystal Caudill
In nineteenth-century Cincinnati, fear keeps Nora Davis caged with secrets and lies. Her true identity as the daughter of a famous opera singer is too dangerous to reveal with her former captors still on the loose. But weekly singing lessons at Longview Asylum—her paranoid mother’s permanent residence—light a flame in Nora, and it’s one she can avoid fanning for only so long.
With his suicidal ma in the asylum, Ezekiel Beaumont’s soul is weary, but Nora’s presence at the asylum intrigues him. As a Pike’s Opera House employee, Ezekiel thinks Nora might be cut out for the stage. He also begins to wonder if Nora’s ma is really the famed Constanza Brisbane, who went missing mid-performance. He’s determined to find out.
Though Ezekiel brings the performance world a little too close for comfort, Nora is drawn to his warm personality all the same. The two of them steadily grow closer, but then Nora begins to fear she’s being watched, and her own paranoia blooms.
Amazon | Baker Book House | Barnes and Noble | Books-A-Million | Bookshop.org | Christianbook.com | Kregel Parable Christian Bookstore
Shadows in the Mind’s Eye by Janyre Tromp
Charlotte Anne Mattas longs to turn back the clock. Before her husband, Sam, went to serve his country in the war, he was the man everyone could rely on—responsible, intelligent, and loving. But the person who’s come back to their family farm is very different from the protector Annie remembers. Sam’s experience in the Pacific theater has left him broken in ways no one can understand—but that everyone is learning to fear.
Tongues start wagging after Sam nearly kills his own brother. Now when he claims to have seen men on the mountain when no one else has seen them, Annie isn’t the only one questioning his sanity and her safety. If there were criminals haunting the hills, there should be evidence beyond his claims. Is he really seeing what he says, or is his war-tortured mind conjuring ghosts?
Annie desperately wants to believe her husband. But between his irrational choices and his nightmares leaking into the daytime, she’s terrified he’s going mad. Can she trust God to heal Sam’s mental wounds—or will sticking by him mean keeping her marriage at the cost of her own life?
The Lost Melody by Joanna Davidson Politano
When concert pianist Vivienne Mourdant’s father dies, he leaves to her the care of a patient at Hurstwell Asylum. Vivienne had no idea the woman existed, and yet her portrait is shockingly familiar. When the asylum claims she was never a patient there, Vivienne is compelled to discover what happened to the figure she remembers from childhood dreams.
The longer she lingers in the deep shadows and forgotten towers at Hurstwell, the fuzzier the line between sanity and madness becomes. She hears music no one else does, receives strange missives with rose petals between the pages, and untangles far more than is safe for her to know.
But can she uncover the truth about the mysterious woman she seeks? And is there anyone at Hurstwell she can trust with her suspicions?
Washington, D.C., 1921. As America prepares to honor the first Unknown Soldier, Elsie St. Clair longs for freedom from her father’s cruel control and the chance to build a life of her own. Instead, she is forced into the spotlight of the upcoming ceremonies when she’s chosen to serve as companion to Gunnery Sergeant Phillip Pierce—a decorated Marine tasked with bearing the Unknown Soldier to his final rest.
Phillip is a war hero, but the medals pinned to his chest weigh heavy with loss and unspoken pain. To Elsie, his quiet strength and battle-hardened scars stir a hope she thought long dead: the hope of being truly seen and loved. Yet danger shadows their every step—from subtle whispers in the capital to the schemes of a jealous rival determined to come between them.
When Phillip offers Elsie a marriage of convenience, it seems a practical way to shield her from harm and keep his own heart untouched. But as they raise her orphaned nephew together, friendship blossoms into a tender bond neither can deny. Still, secrets from the past threaten to shatter the fragile peace they’ve found, forcing them to decide if they will cling to silence—or risk everything for the kind of love that bears all things.
Midnight’s Budding Morrow by Carolyn Miller
Sarah Drayton is eager to spend a holiday at her best friend’s crumbling Northumberland castle estate. Alas, rather than easy companionship with her dear friend, she finds herself being inveigled into a marriage of convenience with her friend’s rakish brother.
When James Langley returns to his family’s estate, war is raging and he wants only distraction, not serious tethers. But his roguish ways have backed him into a corner, and he has little choice but to obey his father’s shocking decree: marry before returning to war…or else. Suddenly he finds himself wedded to a clever and capable woman he barely knows.
Sarah craves love and a place to belong, neither of which James offered before returning to the battlefront. Now everyone around her thinks she married above her station, and they have no intention of rewarding her for such impertinence. Only when her husband returns from war does she begins to hope they may find real happiness.
When tragedy strikes, this pair must learn to trust God and cling to the belief that even in the darkest depths of night, the morning still holds hope.
Lost in Darkness by Michelle Griep
Travel writer Amelia Balfour’s dream of touring Egypt is halted when she receives news of a revolutionary new surgery for her grotesquely disfigured brother. This could change everything, and it does. . .in the worst possible way.
Surgeon Graham Lambert has suspicions about the doctor he’s gone into practice with, but he can’t stop him from operating on Amelia’s brother. Will he be too late to prevent the man’s death? Or to reveal his true feelings for Amelia before she sails to Cairo?
Veiled in Smoke by Jocelyn Green
Meg and Sylvie Townsend manage the family bookshop and care for their father, Stephen, a veteran still suffering in mind and spirit from his time as a POW during the Civil War. But when the Great Fire sweeps through Chicago’s business district, they lose much more than just their store.
The sisters become separated from their father and make a harrowing escape from the flames with the help of Chicago Tribune reporter Nate Pierce. Once the smoke clears away, they reunite with Stephen, only to learn soon after that their family friend was murdered on the night of the fire. Even more shocking, Stephen is charged with the crime and committed to the Cook County Insane Asylum.
Though homeless and suddenly unemployed, Meg must not only gather the pieces of her shattered life, but prove her father’s innocence before the asylum truly drives him mad.
Recommended Reads on the Top of My TBR Pile
(In No Particular Order)
A Heart Deceived by Michelle Griep
Miri Brayden teeters on a razor’s edge between placating and enraging her brother, whom she depends upon for support. Yet if his anger is unleashed, so is his madness. Miri must keep his descent into lunacy a secret, or he’ll be committed to an asylum—and she’ll be sent to the poorhouse.
Ethan Goodwin has been on the run all of his life—from family, from the law … from God. After a heart-changing encounter with the gritty Reverend John Newton, Ethan would like nothing more than to become a man of integrity—an impossible feat for an opium addict charged with murder.
When Ethan shows up on Miri’s doorstep, her balancing act falls to pieces. Both Ethan and Miri are caught in a web of lies and deceit—fallacies that land Ethan in prison and Miri in the asylum with her brother. Only the truth will set them free.
Specters in the Glass House by Jaime Jo Wright
In 1921, Marian Arnold, the heiress to a brewing baron’s empire, seeks solace in the glass butterfly house on her family’s Wisconsin estate as Prohibition and the deaths of her parents cast a long shadow over her shrinking world. When Marian’s sanctuary is invaded by nightmarish visions, she grapples with the line between hallucinations of things to come and malevolent forces at play in the present. With dead butterflies as the killer’s ominous signature, murders unfold at a steady pace. Marian, fearful she might be next, enlists the help of her childhood friend Felix, a war veteran with his own haunted past.
In the present day, researcher Remy Shaw becomes entangled in an elderly biographer’s quest to uncover the truth behind Marian Arnold’s mysterious life and the unsolved murders linked to an infamous serial killer. Joined by Marian’s great-great-grandson, can Remy expose the evil that lurks beneath broken wings? Or will the dark legacy surrounding the manor and its glass house destroy yet another generation?
Miss Blaire in Blackwell’s Island (The Gray Chamber) by Grace Hitchcock
Will Edyth prove her sanity before it is too late?
On Blackwell’s Island, New York, a hospital was built to keep its patients from ever leaving.
With her late parents’ fortune under her uncle’s care until her twenty-fifth birthday in the year 1887, Edyth Blaire does not feel pressured to marry or to bow to society’s demands. She freely indulges in eccentric hobbies like fencing and riding her velocipede in her cycling costume about the city for all to see. Finding a loophole in the will, though, her uncle whisks Edyth off to the women’s lunatic asylum just weeks before her birthday. And Edyth fears she will never be found.
At the asylum she meets another inmate, who upon discovering Edyth’s plight, confesses that she is Nellie Bly, an undercover journalist for The World. Will either woman find a way to leave the terrifying island and reclaim her true self?
Until the Dawn by Elizabeth Camden
A volunteer for the newly established Weather Bureau, Sophie van Riijn needs access to the highest spot in her village to report the most accurate readings. Fascinated by Dierenpark, an abandoned mansion high atop a windswept cliff in the Hudson River Valley, Sophie knows no better option despite a lack of permission from the absent owners.
The first Vandermark to return to the area in sixty years, Quentin intends to put an end to the shadowy rumors about the property that has brought nothing but trouble upon his family. Ready to tear down the mansion, he is furious to discover a local woman has been trespassing on his land.
Instantly at odds, Quentin and Sophie find common ground when she is the only one who can reach his troubled son. There’s a light within Sophie that Quentin has never known, and a small spark of the hope that left him years ago begins to grow. But when the secrets of Dierenpark and the Vandermark family history are no longer content to stay in the past, will tragedy triumph or can their tenuous hope prevail?
The Curse of Misty Wayfair by Jaime Jo Wright
Left at an orphanage as a child, Thea Reed vowed to find her mother someday. Now grown, her search takes her to Pleasant Valley, Wisconsin, in 1908. When clues lead her to a mental asylum, Thea uses her experience as a post-mortem photographer to gain access and assist groundskeeper Simeon Coyle in photographing the patients and uncovering the secrets within. However, she never expected her personal quest would reawaken the legend of Misty Wayfair, a murdered woman who allegedly haunts the area and whose appearance portends death.
A century later, Heidi Lane receives a troubling letter from her mother–who is battling dementia–compelling her to travel to Pleasant Valley for answers to her own questions of identity. When she catches sight of a ghostly woman who haunts the asylum ruins in the woods, the long-standing story of Misty Wayfair returns–and with it, Heidi’s fear for her own life.
As two women across time seek answers about their identities and heritage, can they overcome the threat of the mysterious curse that has them inextricably intertwined?
My question for YOU:
What books would YOU recommend that deal with mental illness?
ABOUT CRYSTAL CAUDILL
Crystal Caudill is the author of “dangerously good historical romance.” Her debut novel, Counterfeit Love, was a 2023 Carol Award finalist, and her novella, “Star of Wonder,” won the 2024 Christy Award for short form. She loves history, hot tea, all things bookish, and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. She is a stay-at-home mom, caregiver, and chaos organizer. When she isn’t writing, Crystal can be found hanging with her family and playing board games at her home outside Cincinnati, Ohio. Find out more at crystalcaudill.com.
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